Naming and Allegory in Late Medieval England

by Emily Steiner , University of Pennsylvania

For David Wallace

Medieval names, whether noble or plebeian, whether derived from location, occupation, characteristic, or patronym, point to a theory about difference. By "difference" I mean that emphatic quality that allows us to distinguish someone ("this person") and to assign him or her an individual historical identity ("Bob Rosen, not Bob Smith"). Medieval naming, as it appears in writing, is founded upon the idea that difference is a local quality. The successful identification of a person depends upon maintaining local contexts, not geographical location per se, but rather any proximity of relation, order, or place. Although in later medieval England secondary descriptions were far along in the process of becoming hereditary surnames, the principle that informs medieval naming, both in legal records and in literary texts, is, I argue, a conservative one: it assumes that names are inherently descriptive rather than fixed or hereditary, and thus the capacity of names to identify depends radically upon the contexts in which they appear. This principle still applies, of course, to many small, remote communities today. Significantly, however, in later medieval England, it was a principle articulated in writing, in the documentary contexts invented by medieval clerks.